Unmanned vehicles (also often referred to as robots) can be deployed in a wide variety of applications including, for example, manufacturing or materials handling facilities. In such facilities, a range of tasks may be required, including lifting and transporting materials having widely differing weights and dimensions, travelling various distances under various environmental conditions, and the like. Performing such varying tasks with unmanned vehicles requires that the unmanned vehicles possess sufficient capabilities, if not within each vehicle then within a set of vehicles, to perform all the required tasks.
Ensuring that unmanned vehicles deployed in such facilities poses certain challenges. For example, providing a set of unmanned vehicles that are all capable of performing all of the required tasks may be inefficient, as certain capabilities may rarely be called on (e.g. for less frequently performed tasks). On the other hand, employing vehicles with different capabilities imposes a burden on operators at the facility to assign the correct vehicle to each task when the task is performed.